A group of militants has stormed a hotel near the base camp of the Nanga Parbat peak in northern Pakistan, killing nine foreign tourists and their guide, Pakistani security officials said.

“Unknown people entered a hotel where foreign tourists were
staying last night and opened fire,” Ali Sher, a senior
police officer in the northern Gilgit-Baltistan province, told
Reuters.

According to the official, the assault on the climbers, who were
staying in a small resort close to the base camp of the
ninth-highest mountain in the world, happened at around 1:00 am
local time (20:00 GMT).

The 15-strong gang dressed in uniforms used by a local
paramilitary force shot dead the tourists while holding hotel
employees at gunpoint. A Chinese climber managed to flee.

“The gunmen held the staff hostage and then started killing
foreign tourists and made their escape,” the official added.

The nationalities of several victims of the attack have been
fully confirmed . Authorities in Islamabad say there were three
Ukrainians, three Chinese, one with dual American citizenship,
two tourists from Slovakia, a Lithuanian, and the group’s sherpa
from Nepal. The bodies of the victims will soon be repatriated.

Because there were also reports of one Russian being among the
gunned down tourists, Russia's tourism authority, Rostourism,
told Itar-Tass that the Russian Federation's consular service in
Pakistan was in contact with law enforcement officers.

The Russian Climbing Federation CEO Aleksey Ovchinnikov said
earlier that there were no Russians among the victims of the
terrorist attack. However, there are currently two Russian
expeditions involving ten people in the Pakistani mountains and
these people are being evacuated from the area.

An extremist militant group known as Jundallah claimed that they
were behind the attack. The organization has carried out previous
deadly attacks on Pakistan’s Shiite Muslim minority population.

"These foreigners are our enemies and we proudly claim
responsibility for killing them and will continue such attacks in
the future as well," Jundullah spokesman Ahmed Marwat
told Reuters by telephone.

Another militant group, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, has also
claimed responsibility for the attack, saying their fighters
conducted the killing “to retaliate for the US drone assaults in
north-west Pakistan.

“The killing of foreigners in Gilgit (Baltistan
province) is called to show the international community the
degree of hatred we feel about the Americans attacking our
fighters,” Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan told local media.

It has been reported that the personal items and equipment
of the murdered climbers were stolen in the attack.

Authorities have deployed a large number of security personnel,
as well as helicopters, to the area and have sealed off the crime
scene.

The bodies will have to be recovered by helicopter because of the
remoteness of the northern province that borders China and
Kashmir, an anonymous official told Reuters.

The mountainous Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan is
comparatively free of violence and one of the countries few
tourist destinations. However, the area has seen a recent wave of
insurgent attacks, targeting the province’s Shiite Muslim
minority.